Discrimination Studies Fellowship for Graduate Students

[Bernal, Brenda]

FYI...............Brenda



As many of you may know, the Social Science Research
Council (SSRC) has just announced six areas for the Dissertation Proposal
Development Fellowship (DPDF) Program. The areas are:

--After Secularization: New Approaches to Religion and Modernity
--Discrimination Studies
--Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Contentious Politics
--Multiculturalism, Immigration, and Identity in Western Europe and the
United States
--Spaces of Inquiry
--Virtual Worlds, and

A total of 12 students, covering a wide range of disciplines, are admitted
to each area. Admitted students attend workshops in June and September of
2010, designed to aid their engagement with the area to which they are
admitted.

I am writing to you in my capacity as one of the two Research Directors
for the Discrimination Studies field, to ask you to encourage promising
second- and third-year Ph.D. students to apply to the program. If you
yourself are such a student, I am writing to encourage you to apply and/or
inform other students about this opportunity. Further, I wanted to take
this opportunity to briefly clarify the focus of the Discrimination
Studies field. Discrimination Studies (DS) is not about race; instead,
Discrimination Studies treats discrimination as a general social
phenomenon even as any particular DS analysis may focus on discrimination
concerning a specific social category. Thus, Discrimination Studies
extricates the study of discrimination from a focus on race, or sex, or
age, or any of many other social categories. There are many means by
which the field accomplishes this aim, and many reasons those in the field
think this is useful.

That noted, I am writing in hopes that those of you who are not eligible
for the program will encourage promising eligible students to apply to any
program, DS or otherwise, that connects with their interests. Only a few
students from each discipline will be selected for any of the six areas
announced, because groups of 12 are formed to encourage interdisciplinary
dialogue. But, it is a wonderful opportunity for those selected, and even
those not selected may benefit from thinking through such a project at an
early stage. Thus, I write to you to encourage you to inform promising,
eligible students about the program or, if you are such a student, to
apply. The first link below provides general information:

http://www.ssrc.org/fellowships/dpdf-fellowship/

while the next link is specifically for the 2010 areas:

http://www.ssrc.org/fellowships/competitions/dpdf-fellowship/9E56E847-B2D3-DE11-9D32-001CC477EC70/

To preserve the integrity of the process, students are encouraged to
contact SSRC with any questions they may have. However, if you are a
professor working with eligible students and have questions about the
program, please don't hesitate to contact me or SSRC. I'd be happy to
answer any questions you may have as best I can. Best of luck to any who
apply, and, thank you in advance for your efforts to encourage students to
consider this opportunity.

Sincerely,

Samuel R. Lucas
Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California-Berkeley

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Samuel R. Lucas
Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California-Berkeley
410 Barrows Hall #1980
Berkeley, California 94720-1980
e-mail: Lu...@demog.berkeley.edu
**New UPDATED
home-page: http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/lucas/
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